gwern


"These examples may help unsee surface systems to see the weird machines and Turing-completeness lurking within.

"Computers, in the sense of being Turing-complete, are extremely common. Almost any system of sufficient complexity —unless carefully engineered otherwise —may be found to accidentally support Turing-complete somewhere inside it through weird machines which can be rebuilt out of the original system’s parts, even systems which would appear to have not the slightest thing to do with computation.

"Software systems are especially susceptible to this, which often leads to serious security problems as the Turing-complete components can be used to run attacks on the rest of the system."



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